The MuseumPast Exhibitions
2008
Information forthcoming
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
Chinatown Stories: Realizing the Imagined by Steve Wong
Dec 18, 2003– June 18, 2004
Off-site Exhibitions
Inspiring Lines: Chinese American Pioneers in the Commercial Arts
(This special exhibit is part of the Chinese American Museum's Annual Lantern Festival)Feb 23, 2002 - Apr 7, 2002
El Pueblo Gallery At El Pueblo Monument
Inspiring Lines: Chinese American Pioneers in the Commercial Arts
Dec 15, 2001 - Feb 17, 2002
LMAN Studio
The Chinese American Experience in the San Gabriel Valley
Dec 10, 1999 - Jan 10, 2000
Evergreen Art Gallery
From Hearth to Heaven: Chinatown Living
Feb 23, 1999 - Apr 4, 1999
El Pueblo Gallery
Portraits and Voices
June 1, 1998 - July 31, 1998
Monterey Park Public Library
Contest winner
National Art Competition
June 20, 2009 - Sept. 27, 2009
In 2007 and 2009, students in grades K-12 from across the country participated in a national art competition, hosted by the Chinese American Museum (CAM) and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA), based on the themes of “Growing Up Chinese American” and “Democracy and Diversity,” respectively. The winning entries and honorable mentions from both competitions are now on public display for the first time in this spirited new art exhibition titled National Art Competition. Featuring over fifty colorful artworks spanning two gallery floors, the dual-themed exhibit will reflect an intersection of art, culture, politics and diversity as seen through the eyes of America’s youth.
Press Release (PDF)
Growing Up Chinese American: Childhood Toys and Memories
November 5, 2006- April 8, 2007
Our childhood toys and experiences can deeply influence how we remember the past, understand our place in the world in the present, and lead grown up lives in the future. Growing Up Chinese American: Childhood Toys and Memories is an exhibit that explores this relationship by presenting children’s toys from the Chinese American Museum permanent collection, as well as personal stories of their owners.
By exploring facets of everyday life for children of Chinese descent coming of age in a rapidly changing 20th century America, Growing Up Chinese American presents a complex picture of how childhood can shape our grown up lives in subtle but meaningful ways. The toys and stories featured in the exhibit also suggest by their multiple and varied frames of reference that a broad spectrum of Chinese American childhood experiences exists, and it is from this rich diversity which Chinese American history and Chinese American futures stem.
This exhibition was made possible in part through the generous support of Union Bank of California and Megatoys.
Jake Lee (1915 -1991), Garage Sale
Sunshine & Shadow: In Search of Jake Lee
December 1, 2007 - April 13, 2008
Jake Lee (1915 -1991) was a major figure in 20th-century California art, whose legacy remains a subject of growing interest in the Chinese American community. Lee was a master watercolorist who produced an extensive body of work as both a fine artist and a commercial artist. He was also a beloved teacher whose students continue to be inspired by his instruction and his example.
Lee's first-ever solo museum exhibition brings together watercolor paintings, sketches, photographs and other personal ephemera representing the artist's life and work. Sunshine and Shadow features many artworks that have never been seen by the public, as well as stories gathered from art collectors and close friends of the artist himself. This in-depth look at Lee's oeuvre showcases the artist's signature use of color, his distinctive play of light against shadow, and his uncanny ability to find beauty in even the most mundane subjects. Among the urban and idyllic landscapes and seascapes comprising the exhibit are the covers Lee painted for the Automobile Club of Southern California's member magazine, Westways, from the 1950s to 1970s.
Lee's impressive work places him among the most important Asian American artists of his generation. Late in his career, Lee began to use his art to express some of the tension he felt as a person of two cultures, which is why Lee's work resonates with Chinese American audiences and continues to find new appreciation among viewers of all ages and backgrounds.
The exhibition Sunshine and Shadow: In Search of Jake Lee will be on display from Friday, November 30, 2007 through Sunday, April 13, 2008. A fully illustrated exhibition catalog is available at the Museum Gift Shop.
This exhibition and catalog were produced by the Chinese American Museum in cooperation with the Automobile Club of Southern California.
Celebrate! Chinese Holidays Through the Eyes of Children
November 5, 2006- April 8, 2007
The Chinese American Museum and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA), a pioneering national civil rights organization, present Celebrate! Chinese Holidays Through the Eyes of Children—an exhibit of original artworks about Chinese festivals and celebrations made by school children across the United States. Ten years after the CACA’s original 1995 National Art Competition, these vibrant winning images are brought together again in Celebrate! to signal the exciting return of this nation-wide art contest in 2007, a joint project between CAM and the CACA.
The official Fez of Los Angeles Lodge, the second Lodge to be established in the Alliance in the 1930s.
Chinese American Citizens Alliance
November 5, 2006- April 8, 2007
The Chinese American Citizens Alliance is a national organization whose purpose has been for more than a century to advocate for the rights and promote the well being of the Chinese American community. A group of young men, born in America of Chinese ancestry, formed the Alliance in San Francisco, California in 1895 to fight discriminatory laws fueled by wide spread anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 19th Century.
Since its inception, the Alliance has generated a broad range of political, social and cultural activities based on its abiding commitment to the Chinese American community. Youth programs focusing on civic duty, community awareness, and cultural pride have been a large part of the Alliance's repertoire of community-wide activities. On display in this exhibition were objects ranging from artifacts to historic collateral materials provided by the various Alliance Lodges located throughout the Unites States.
Merging: The Art of Diana Shui-Iu Wong
March 18, 2006 – October 15, 2006
This exhibit narrates Chinese immigration to the United States with an emphasis on community settlement in Los Angeles. The display is outlined into four distinct time periods. Each period is defined by an important immigration law and event, accompanied by a brief description and a short personal story about a local Chinese American and their experiences in that particular historical period.
Milton Quon, Trainyard, Los Angeles, 1983, watercolor on paper, courtesy of the artist. 11 3/8" x 14 3/8"
Impressions: Milton Quon’s Los Angeles
May 15, 2005 – February 26, 2006
This retrospective exhibition on Milton Quan showcased the broad range of the artist’s practice from fine art to commercial work, much of which is on public display for the first time.
Milton Quon is a native of Los Angeles, born in 1913. He is the eldest of eight children and the only son of the Ng Quan Ying family. After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), Quon began his professional career with Walt Disney Studios in 1939, helping animate the films Fantasia and Dumbo. He returned to Disney after the war, joining the Publicity/Promotions Department, doing promotional art on projects and films, including Make Mine Music and Song of the South. Following his tenure at Disney, Quon built a long and successful career as a commercial artist, first as an art director for the ad agency BBD&O, and later at the packaging firm Sealright Co., Inc. Quon also shared his creative talent as an instructor at Los Angeles Trade Tech College.
From whimsical cherubs in Disney’s Fantasia to bold advertising posters, Quon’s commercial work will be presented alongside the artist’s rich collection of fine art works. Quon’s plein-air watercolors chronicle everyday life against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s diverse scenery in a changing natural and urban landscape, from a pre-Dodger’s Stadium Chavez Ravine Grocery store and New Chinatown Gateway to the Santa Monica Beach Pier. With rich, intuitive colors and expressive lines, Quon captures in watercolor the vibrant energy of our sun-kissed beaches, the dreary structures of industrial refineries and the crowded train yards converging at the heart of Los Angeles.
As a tireless artist, fishing enthusiast and avid traveler, Quon is always armed with a sketchbook, pens and watercolors, recording subjects of local interest as well as his travels across the country and abroad. Finally, the exhibit will also feature Quon’s imaginative personal Christmas cards which blend conventional Christmas imagery with traditional Chinese painting style and elements.
Sam Boi Lee, Mother's Pillbox, 2003, lightjet print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. 20" x 24"
A Portrait of My Mother by Sam Boi Lee
May 15, 2005 – February 26, 2006
As a cultural history museum, CAM values work by local emerging artists who address the broad scope of our mission in provocative and exploratory ways. Sam Boi Lee’s poignant photographic series about his mother, Binh Tu Phan, operates like a photo-essay told through eloquent images of his mother’s world, from everyday objects that are imbued with his mother’s nurturing strength to his own expressions of loss and love.
As much more than just delicate remembrances, these photographs are as sentimental and ethereal as they are grounded in the realities of his mother’s everyday life —from the fleeting and mundane to moments of great anguish, love, uncertainty, frustration, and enlightenment.
Lee’s A Portrait of My Mother provides museum visitors with glimpses at the connections between the history lessons we teach at CAM and the individual stories that come to shape that history. In the wake of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Lee’s immediate family strategically split up and fled Vietnam to all parts of the globe. As the son of a P.O.W. and the youngest of nine children, Lee was only six years old when he embarked on this emigration. After multiple migrations, the family finally reunited in Los Angeles ten years later.
By pairing this gripping American story, as told in the museum’s permanent exhibit about immigration, Journeys, alongside Lee’s body of photographs in A Portrait of My Mother, we invite visitors to consider the ways in which ordinary people make history everyday, how we remember our history, and how history shapes our present and our future.
Untitled, Guoache on paper board, 30" x 40", 1970s
John Kwok: Line and Color
November 13, 2004 – May 1, 2005
This exhibition featured artwork by local artist John Kwok (1920-1983), an important figure in Los Angeles’ art scene and the Chinese American community since the 1940s. As a member of the National Watercolor Society, California Watercolor Society and American Watercolor Society, his art was a fixture in regional and national shows from 1947 to 1982.
Kwok’s artistic achievements and the large body of work that he leaves behind represent his commitment to making art and his contribution to Chinese American history. Among the fifty works featured in this exhibition are six award-winning pieces, as well as works from Kwok’s personal collection that were on public display for the first time.
Installation by Cindy Suryiani
(Invisible): Angel Island by Cindy Suriyani
July 9, 2004 - May 1, 2005
Created by Los Angeles-based artist Cindy Suryiani, this mixed media art installation consists of light, hanging Chinese rice paper scrolls and life size puppets explored themes of identity, displacement, inclusion, and ultimately of Americanism. Named after the grueling immigrant processing center off the coast of San Francisco, the body of work reinterprets the Island (as it was called by its inmates), from a political, historical perspective, and explores the experiences of the Island’s many Chinese detainees.
Suriyani’s work illustrates the poems of hope, frustration, and longing etched into the barracks’ walls, bedposts, and open surfaces by immigrants from China’s Pearl River Delta. The Island symbolizes more than a rite of passage into the multitude of uncertainties that defined Chinese American experience in the early Twentieth Century. As a nation of immigrants and their descendants, this exhibition underscored the issue of transculturalism, our struggle for human dignity, and our need to make where we are a place we can call home.
Tyrus Wong, Self Portrait, 14 1/2 " x 21 3/8", late 1920s, watercolor on paper.
Chinese American Museum, gift of Sanora Babb Howe
Tyrus Wong: A Retrospective
December 18, 2004 – October 17, 2004
This exhibition showcased the works of Tyrus Wong, who at the age of 93, is one of the earliest and most influential Chinese American artists in the United States. In his long, pioneering career as a local artist, Wong is a seasoned painter, muralist, ceramicist, lithographer, designer, and kite maker. This exhibition also featured Wong’s imaginative kites, which he has been building and flying for the past 30 years. Drawn from public and private collections, several of the pieces chosen for this exhibition have not been shown publicly since the 1930s.
Chinatown Stories: Realizing the Imagined by Steve Wong
December 18, 2003– June 18, 2004
This installation piece by Steve Wong explores the theme of community through the use of postcards. By collecting personal stories and memories from community members, as well as the sellers of the vintage Chinatown postcards he has amassed on e-bay for this project, Steve Wong enters these disparate voices into a dialogue of ideas about Chinatown, specifically, and what places come to mean in everyday life.